Original Work of Electronic Literature by Darren Brautigam

Steel City History

        My piece of electronic literature was a Google Maps presentation that went through and showed some of the historical locations in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Some of these places shown helped shape Pittsburgh into the great city its known as today.
       Within this piece, you are able to click on a location from a list on the side and read about its history, along with a couple images of that place. They vary from dating back to the times during the French and Indian War, to when the city really started to become a city.
       This piece of original e-lit was inspired by me growing up in this city and being so intrigued by what happened in it in the past. I have always been curious about how Pittsburgh was built and what had to happen in order to make it an astonishing, functional city.

Examining the Future of the Common Wealth

I chose to create a piece of electronic literature that takes you on a tour of Pennsylvania's lowest ranked public schools. I chose to do this because I am an education and special education major and my dream is to work in a high poverty school district. There is something about being that person for the students that keeps them going and lets them know that they can do anything they want in life.
With that being said, these schools that you will see in my piece have very low graduation rates and the one is not even able to afford a high school so after middle school they send their students to neighboring schools. The crime rate in these areas is very high as well. In the first school you will come across, Wilkinsburg, the city of Wilkinsburg has a 57% higher crime rate than the national average. Due to the low graduation rates, that is causing the students that do not graduate to find alternative ways of income, which leads to higher risk of crime, as seen in the Wilkinsburg case. This piece was not made to offend anyone if they attended any of these schools, I just wanted to lay out the statistics because I saw them and was in complete shock. I also highlighted the Common Core state averages so that the viewers are able to compare the statistics to a state average. Education is something that is very important to me and I wish that every student could have an equal opportunity. I hope you enjoy Examining the Future of the Common Wealth !




Works cited:

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2018/01/the_50_worst_school_districts.html

*I used the Wikipedia pages for all the schools*

https://www.google.com/search?q=pa+state+common+core+standards&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS790US790&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjy8p30jKPeAhVNslMKHXqADzsQ_AUIDygC&biw=1440&bih=686

Erik Bengtson's Original Work of E-literature

For a lot of people, college is a time where they find themselves.  Yes, I know it sounds cliche, but I’m not kidding people really do figure out who they are when they are in college.  Though I do well in school now, in the past that wasn’t always the case.  For me, it took more than just going to college to evaluate who I was, and compare that to who I wanted to be.  I’m not saying I’ve had some sort of great epiphany that has caused me to change myself entirely, but I have changed because of a series of small events in my life.  I think that in our lives we all have little moments that may have more significance than we realize.  We go through the day-to-day grind in life without really appreciating how these seemingly meaningless events shape what we do and who we are.  I wanted to take the opportunity while creating my own original work of E-literature to try to capture some of the little moments in my life that have changed who I am.  So, I have decided to create a Google Maps essay containing various journal entries that capture my thoughts and feelings at the times of the events.  This means that I am going to have to ask you to forgive my ignorance at times, as I have learned from the story I am about to share with you.

Little Things, A Google Maps Essay